The Kolkata Toilet Queue
The glory of a January morning is a scene worth standing still for. The bitter cold of the night is slipping away and light is coming in, literally. Birds are already at it. At the horizon, black is giving space to orange mixed with yellow and white. The grass is wet from the dew. Your feet are warm from the night under your blankets — and the thought of stepping out onto the cold, wet ground is enough to make you hesitate at the door. Something good lies ahead, but the path to it is uncomfortable. You step out anyway.
I was returning from a family trip to Gangasagar when I found myself on exactly such a morning — standing in a long queue, waiting for my turn at a public toilet nearly 500 metres from where we had camped in a makeshift arrangement in a large open ground somewhere in Kolkata. The city was overwhelmed by the annual Gangasagar fair. Hotels were fully booked. We were a group of about 12 people and it was impossible to find a room to accommodate all of us. Hence the grass. Hence the tent. The mattress was not an issue. The toilet was.
On that beautiful morning after a chilly winter night, what I observed in that queue has stayed with me for more than 15 years. People outside were desperate to get in. People coming out were always complaining about the filth inside. And yet, every complaint fell on deaf ears. The queue did not move back. Nobody left. This is how we are wired — no warning is strong enough to replace experience.
The Queue Is Everywhere
In the 15 years since that morning, I turned from a college kid into an automotive engineer. One thing that remained unchanged is the situation with jobs. Those working somewhere are always complaining about the problems and the filth in their organisation. They can make an excel sheet about the obstacles they navigate every single day and still manage to produce quality work. On the other hand are those in the queue to get in somewhere — paying no attention to the complaints of those already inside.
The Kolkata toilet queue is present everywhere, in some form or the other.
The same person who was on top of the world when they cleared an interview and got the offer letter, finds themselves at the bottom of the barrel within months. Daily work becomes drudgery. The morning rush to the office becomes something to dread.
This cycle — early excitement followed by prolonged drudgery — repeats itself endlessly. Jobs, relationships, shopping, travel, new people. It does not matter. The pattern holds.
The real problem is this: the moment you have something, it loses its charge. This is not a personal failing. It is a trick the brain plays — it makes things desirable in absence and ordinary in possession. Think about the last thing you desperately wanted. A job, a gadget, a holiday, a person. The wanting had a particular energy to it. And then you got it. The energy didn’t transfer. It just dissolved. Desire is a distance thing. It lives in the gap between you and what you want. The moment that gap closes, desire has nowhere to live. What felt urgent becomes routine. What felt like arrival turns out to be just another room. And soon enough, you are standing in a new queue, wanting the next thing. You are not broken for feeling this. You have simply discovered how the mechanism works. The brain is not interested in your satisfaction.
It is interested in your movement.
Satisfaction is the end of movement.
So the brain withholds it.
The Only Way Out
So the question is: how do you get out of this loop?
The answer is purpose.
When the purpose of what you are doing far outweighs you and your life, the everyday work stops being the point. It becomes a gear in a larger machine — you do your part each day and its meaning is clear, because you can see where it leads. A person in pursuit of a great goal finds something worthwhile even in failure. The goal has to be so worthy that success and failure start to look similar — both just steps in the journey. Such a person does their work without attachment because there is genuinely nothing in it for them personally. Even if their contribution goes unnoticed, they are satisfied to have contributed. Credit — giving and taking — is a simple and somewhat cute feature of office life. For people with real goals, it is beside the point.
Think of a scientist working on a problem that may not be solved in their lifetime. They run the same experiment with small variations, record results that mostly say nothing, and write papers that a few hundred people in the world will read. There is no applause. There is no moment of public vindication for most of them. The ones who do get credited are often standing on decades of invisible work done by people whose names appear in footnotes, if at all. And yet they show up. The laboratory is not drudgery for them — it is the site of the fight. The question they are chasing is bigger than their career, bigger than their reputation, bigger than the funding cycle. That is the only reason a person can sustain that kind of work without breaking.
A teacher operates on a similar logic, except the returns are even harder to trace. You teach a child something today and you may never know what it became in them twenty years later. The classroom is rarely grateful in real time. The child who sat in the third row and seemed to be looking out of the window may be the one who carried your words the furthest. A teacher who is in it for recognition will not last — the feedback loop is too slow and too quiet. But a teacher who understands that they are tending to something larger than a syllabus, something that will outlive the academic year and probably outlive them, finds a different kind of fuel. The work is the same. The meaning is entirely different.
A spy walks into situations where the odds are entirely against them, where no one will ever know their name if they succeed, and where failure means they are completely on their own. The mission cannot be spoken about at dinner. The sacrifice cannot be acknowledged at a ceremony. If things go right, someone else gets the credit. If things go wrong, they were never there. Everything personal — identity, safety, recognition, even the basic human need to be known by someone — is placed on the table. And they go anyway. Not because they are fearless. But because the purpose has made the personal cost feel beside the point.
This worthy goal is what the Gita calls Dharma Yuddha. A fight to uphold Dharma. Know your Dharma. And then disappear into it.
That is the only way this life stops feeling like a queue.
Just Think Over It.
PS: In that queue, I got my chance after 45 minutes. Within 3 minutes, the knocking on the tin gate started. In the next two minutes, it was so vigorous that I lost all sense of purpose and rushed out.
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